Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
1
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
TW: This is Tracie Wilson, I’m interviewing Vic Lukas at his home in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina. It is June 18, 2007. This is part of the project for the Campus Folksong
Club history.
VL: Okay, let’s go, let’s start.
TW: So, my first question is how did you become interested in traditional music?
VL: I became interested in traditional music because, having lived in foreign countries
like Italy and India for a long time, I was very very very hungry for American music.
What I now realize I was looking for was what I call blue notes. Somehow the twang of
a steel guitar or some of the thing that you could hear, but I only heard them in occasional
snatches. I remember hearing some Italian women imitating the Andrews Sisters doing
“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B” and I knew that they didn’t know any
English, they were just completely parodying it. But I loved the sound of that, whatever
the boogie woogie part was, and I had heard Roy Acuff, and the Smokey Mountain Boys
doing the Prodigal Son on an OK Records, a recording in 1947, and I got that from the
United States information agency library, the cultural propaganda arm for the United
States. We were in Italy at the time, and the powers that be decided that Roy Acuff, in
his hillbilly band with the whiney Dobro guitar did not appropriately represent American
culture. So, they were getting rid of the stuff and my dad brought it home. I didn’t
realize at the time that that could be considered to have some relation to traditional music,
I didn’t know who Roy Acuff was, but I knew that that sound really turned me on. Very
very occasionally perhaps a classical piano player from the United State might pass
through or I would hear them at a cocktail party and maybe they might play one to eight
the bar boogie, you know, sort of as a part of it, and these things really really really
fascinated me. That kind of started me out trying very hard, listening over short waves to
American Armed Services broadcasts in Germany and later in India from Ceylon.
To hear American music and just hearing little bits and pieces of blues sorts of
things, and boogie sorts of things. I was just incredibly hungry for American culture.
When I got back to the United States, I was 13 and got dropped into an American high
school. And not having spoken much American English, I sounded like an Indian kid,
and it took me three months, and this was just when rock and roll was just beginning to
come in. By 1954, there was Rocking 88, by 1955 Elvis was bringing black music to
white kids, things like “Mystery Train,” things like “That’s Alright Mama” “Big Boy”
Crudup’s big hit. Things like Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” of course that’s a
false guess there, because it was actually written by Leiber and Stoller of Chicago. But
you know, Leiber and Stoller were really great blues men and they recorded and wrote a
whole bunch of stuff for black groups, they were writing for the Coasters, and for the
Ravens, and for Big Mama Thornton, and actually they’re on a lot of the recordings
playing piano, you know that boogie, bluesy piano. And so, all of these were things that
were drawing me toward a sort of bluesy sound. Well, by the time I got out of high
school there were beginnings, just kind of beginnings; Harry Belafonte had appeared on,
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
2
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
I think it was the Ed Sullivan Show or he had his own special. That was perhaps the very
beginning of the traditional folk boom.
But again, it was these occasional little bluesy kind of notes and little bits of
American stuff, and we had a very eclectic record store. My parents were always really
nice about letting me buy records, so I wound up taking chances on records that I had
never heard of. I wound up with a Stinson recording of Sonny Terry and Blind Gary
Davis, I wound up with some early jazz things from the RCA Victor recorded
encyclopedia of jazz. The supermarket had ten inch record things which instead of
plates, you’d go in every week and buy a record, and they had a few blues things by
Sleepy John Estes, and these things just delighted me to no end. By the time I got to
college, I was 16, because I was very bright and my parents thought I should go to
summer school and I was always the advanced. Being a 16-year-old kid in the Greek
dominated, fraternity-dominated college, the only people that would have to do with me
socially were what I now recall as the outsiders. These were the blacks, the gays, some
of the foreign students who didn’t have big enough foreign constituents of their own,
other anomalies like the 16 year old kid that was really bright but still had incredible
blind spots about American history and American culture. And these were the people
that took me in. One of the people who took me in was named Harry Babbitt, and
Babbitt was a Bohemian and, for lack of a better word, a beatnik and he used to ramrod
the folksong club, not the Campus Folksong Club, the folksong club which was just a
bunch of like-minded people, and we used to get together in the basement of the
Unitarian Church, and sing songs by Woody Guthrie. There were a few hillbilly songs
that crept in, but mostly this was a matter of gut string guitars, minimal proficiency, and
the first Carter Family record that I heard was introduced by a woman who was
unabashedly lesbian named Nora Kurchie. And Nora was actually a very fine singer, and
she actually had a recording of the Carter Family, and I heard that, and I was once again
just completely blown away. And it kind of grew from there, and I just continued to
occasionally was able to find a record by Big Bill Broonzy, and I took it to my fraternity,
yes, I was in a fraternity, they wanted me for my grades, and I took it one Saturday
morning because we used to take turns for work days on Saturday and you could bring a
record.
Oh, I didn’t live in the chapter house, being only 16 my parents thought that I was
too young to live in a fraternity, they’re the ones who thought I should join. And you
know, can you say outsider? To the young kid who isn’t even allowed to live in the
house but he’s got good grades. And, I put on this Big Bill Broonzy record for Saturday
workday, and somebody came up to me and said, “What do you want to hear some old
nigger sing like that for?” Well, there ensued fisticuffs and general things, they tried to
shave me, but I had an advantage in which there was a lot of them and only one of me, I
could fight but they couldn’t really hurt me because it was so clearly unfair. In the
process, a lamp went through the plate glass window, and I didn’t return to the frat house
after that, but that was, you know, just another of the big steps. And I was attracted to the
outsider-ness because partly of the somewhat radical politics. While in the foreign lands,
getting American culture from the United States Information Agency, I had really bought
that America is a democracy, we have freedom, everybody is equal, freedom even to this
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
3
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
day the president keeps talking about freedom, the Iraqis have freedom, and well gee,
18,000 of them locked up, Abu Ghraib, troops on every street corner, people afraid to
leave their houses, but let’s not worry about that, they got freedom! I really really
believed in freedom and to this day, I am disappointed that the freedom isn’t really free,
the democracy is actually a plutocracy, if not a kleptocracy. And I was therefore drawn
to the politics of the beat generation, and that meant by and large the liberals, all the folk
singing folks were liberal, some of them, and the beginning of the civil rights movement
were coming in, and of course there was political folksong.
And as it happened within the pre-Campus Folksong Club, a pre-official thing,
there was a whole lot of, well for lack of a better word, blues notes for whatever America
had that was its own individual music was calling out to me, and I read the back of record
jackets, and I listened to, there was a red vinyl Library of Congress recording, the only
one that was owned by the University Library, which at that time was the biggest
university library in the nation, but we had all of one folk record. But I listened to it over
and over again, and it had Bozie Sturdivant’s “Ain’t no grave can hold my body down,”
one of the great vocal masterpieces of American music. It had other black folksong type
things, and each was more wonderful than the last. I think I kept it just about on
permanent loan and wore it out, tape recorders weren’t available then. And after a while
the Smith Anthology came out, and the University bought one copy of that, despite the
fact that later we had however many whether it was 400, 500, or 1,000 members, we still
didn’t have much in the way of folk records and such as they were, were labor records
and wound up in the library, the Labor and Industrial Relations Library. So, meanwhile
there was a little bit more interest, things were sort of starting to grow, but I’m going to
stop there with the question was, how did you get interested in traditional music. Well
that was the long answer, and the short answer is because traditional music meant
America to me, it meant all the things that America was supposed to be. It meant
freedom, it meant poetry, it meant creativity at the peasant level, and it meant working
men. My family was so not working class, that somehow this was important to me, and
whatever my genetic makeup is, makes me a contrarian to some extent. And I just found
that that particular kind of music, what little I knew about it, just every single bit of it just
turned me on. I guess we’ll stop there, for that do you need further elaboration?
TW: So, what year did you come back to the United States?
VL: I came back to the United States in, the best I can figure out was 1953, and started
school at Urbana High School in the fall of 1953, and I graduated in 1957. And I started
at the University of Illinois in 1957.
TW: So you started college in 1957 when you were 16?
VL: Yes, well actually, right. My birthday is December 21, so 1957 would have made
me still 16, waiting to be 17.
TW: So, how did you end up at the University of Illinois?
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
4
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
VL: I ended up at the University of Illinois because that’s where my father worked, he
was on the faculty at the College of Commerce, he was a professor, and he gained his
expertise, he was a CPA, and he had worked for UNRA (United Nations Reconstruction
and something Organization) but basically they administered the Marshall Plan as I
understand it. And he was the chief accountant who had designed the accounting system
for the Marshall Plan, and from his experience in that in 1947 we went to Rome, Italy
where he was the administrative officer for the American Embassy, and then as is
frequently the case in foreign service, we got transferred to India, and I kind of think that
was 1951 or 1952, and I went to a year and a half of school in India, and then returned to
the United States, having really hungered and thirsted for whatever this mythical
American homeland. I mean I bought the whole thing, you cannot believe how strong
my faith in these things really were. And I found myself interested in all things
American, except oddly enough, American history.
Because American history was taught was bunch of dates, and I never could learn
things like 1779, House of Burgesses, I mean that whole thing was completely
meaningless. I still don’t care much about revolutionary history, my bag is now at this
point is starting at 1840 with minstrel shows, and I guess my particular period of major
interest is the 30s and 40s. But my dad was on the faculty, I was right there in town, my
parents were somewhat overprotective, I was too young to stay in the frat house, I was
too young to go away to college, and I had a national merit scholarship, which was good
at the University of Illinois, paid all of my hundred dollars a semester tuition. So for the
first year I lived at home under the watchful guise of my parents which made me that
much more of an outsider. Much more used to subterfuge, to have any type of social life
at all. And then I got to stay in approved housing. They used to lock up the girls in
dorms, 1 o’clock, that’s a whole another kettle of fish, but I got a little bit of freedom
because I didn’t have to come home. Still just being that young, the social circle that I
was able to join were folks that were interested in folk music, and I guess I really was
more interested in that than anybody else.
TW: So how did you become a part of the Campus Folksong Club?
VL: Well, I’ve partially given you an answer to that. The folksong club, as led by Harry
Babbitt, Nora Kurchie, I’m not sure that led is the quite the word, we didn’t really have
officers, but basically they would make things happen. It was a small enough group,
there were maybe 10 of us, 15 including sort of peripheral folks. We also went to the
international folk dancing, where again there were girls who would dance, from my point
of view, who would dance in some form or fashion, with young kid, and that just didn’t
happen at the social dances. Campus Folksong Club we had this informal thing and we
became friends, and it was through Nora Kurchie that I met some of the local black
musicians. There was a place called the Porthole, which was a place for sailors, but the
lesbian ladies were welcome, and they had a guy who was an entertainer there, kind of a
la Pigmeat Markham but was also a musician, a cross between Pigmeat Markham and
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and I’m not sure that either of them were well known at that
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
5
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
point. And Count Demon, as the first one to take me to the Black blues club, which was
the only place in town that would let me drink. And they were nice to me, because it’s
always been true, when I had been sincerely interested in people and their music then
they’re generally pretty nice to me. If I come on and pretend to know a lot about it, well
that’s a whole ‘nother thing can happen. But mostly for musicians, if you care about the
music enough, people are nice. Lots of people have been nice to me over the years, I
have incurred a tremendous debt, I make a conscious effort to pay that debt off by
helping other people when they come along, and sometimes that’s a little difficult.
So that was the Campus Folksong Club. The Campus Folksong Club per se got
started when Archie Green came to the campus, and I don’t remember exactly how we
met him, but I know that although Archie in his papers suggests that we first met when
Dick Kanar and I approached him at the Chicago Festival the first year that he was
emceeing it. My own recollection, and given my age and everything it is conceivable
that my recollection is not good, but we already knew Archie, we already knew him
pretty well by then. And Mike Flasher was the original organizer and was the president
of the Chicago Folklore Society, I can’t remember the exact name of the club, the
organization that puts on the folk festival, and we had Simon Stanfield, who knew a
bunch of the Chicago folks, and he was also a member of our circle of musicians and
musician wannabes. And he knew Mike Flasher, and somehow I remember that we’d
have some discussions with Mike, and we used to go up to Chicago to party, musicalize,
blues club, and Mike Flasher was looking for a respectable folklorist that he wouldn’t
have to pay too much for, and we suggested Archie. And we already knew Archie, I feel
very well by then, at least we maybe had known him for a year, I feel that we met him
soon after his arrival. But I can’t speak to that, you’ll have to ask Archie about when he
arrived, although I disagree that it was in 1961 at the Folk Festival. I feel that we met
him soon after his arrival, I don’t remember exactly how that happened. But we became
very good friends because he understood; and of course his politics, he was very much a
Woody Guthrie fan, a labor historian, he could point us toward some recordings, and he
could dig up artists and he had a bunch of lore. He was the first ‘respectable’ person who
had had any interest in us, anyone who was willing to see past the scuffy bunch of
outsiders and beatniks and was able to help and guide us. Archie managed to get us a
form of recognition as a campus society, and again I don’t know exactly how he did that,
but it was pretty miraculous. He wound up being our faculty sponsor, and the growth of
the Campus Folksong Club, meanwhile by this time the New Lost City Ramblers had
formed, I’m a little confused, I think the Kingston Trio was 1957, the Ramblers were
1959, I could even have those reversed, it is conceivable, but anyways, kind of both of
those things happened right around then.
We Initially had some more traditional concerts, we had Brownie McGhee and
Sonny Terry. I can’t remember whether we had Pete Seeger again, we’d had Pete Seeger
as the unofficial version. I think Pete Seeger charged all of fifty bucks. I think that we
were prevented from actually having Pete Seeger return under the Campus Folksong
Club, the official version, because I believe he was a little too left wing for the really
rather right wing, Illinois campus state university place. The more radical things were
left to the Chicago Pier campus, where the preponderance of the black students who went
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
6
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
up there. Archie was able to direct us more toward traditional music, and away from
what he referred to as ‘interpreters’ of traditional music, meaning the more commercial or
second generation people. He was able to show us that there was a great deal beyond the
Kingston Trio, that there was a great deal beyond Joan Baez, that there was a great deal
beyond Harry Belafonte. And I just rode along with Archie at that point. Also I
mentioned Dick Kanar, there was something else that had happened, which I had taken a
trip across the United States with Dick Kanar, and I had been trying to figure out exactly
which year, there was a summer in Chicago, and about a half of a year traveling by
thumb. The best I can make out must have been in 1960. There was a hiatus from the
University once I had a degree and I’m a little confused about that. But during that time I
lived in Chicago and made a lot of contacts in Chicago with the folk community
including Simon, I’ve mentioned Mike Flasher, people like Mike Bloomfield showing up
for hootenannies and with Dick Kanar, I was in a partnership with a coffeehouse in
Chicago called The Red and the Black. It was on Clark St somewhat close to the Loop, it
was in a block that was close to the College of Complexes, which was a radical comedy
club run by Slim Brundage the janitor who was a Wobblie, left-wing, sort of used himself
as an entertainer. There was a guy who was running a little bookstore in front of the
College of Complexes that was running for the beatnik candidate for president. Next to
that was a strip show that was run by the mob, and then there was the Red and the Black.
And the Red and the Black paid very little rent, in fact, no rent at all. We were largely
open late at night, we had folksingers, sometimes it was me, sometimes it was other
Chicago folks. But mostly we were open late at night, and when the other clubs would
close like standup comedian staff would come by our place, and basically do freebies,
because we tried to project an image of being real in this seedy, not really in the
mainstream of the entertainment district. There was, we somehow had an association
with the strip joint that Tiny, the bouncer for the strip joint, also acted as the bouncer for
us. We had a specific gentleman of Italian extraction that we had to buy our coffee from,
but other than that we got strictly left alone. So a lot of the folksingers would come late
after the other places closed, it wasn’t a moneymaker, it really wasn’t a money maker.
And after that, wound up going back on the road trip, and then going back to
school and then meeting Archie and the Campus Folksong Club took off from that point.
But by the time I met Archie I was run radical, not necessarily by politics politics, but
radical, just plain radical. Some of that frankly had to do with, no one ever talks about
this, I was a young adolescent with raging hormones, being already an outsider of sorts,
regular avenues of romance were not easily available, and I somehow formed the idea by
a gross misreading of the back cover of On the Road that talked about infamous yobbio
obsessions. I thought that beatnik girls were easy, not that this was ever proved, mind
you, but that was good deal of motivation to get into that culture. And of course being
with the outsiders, a large percentage of the women that were part of our group were in
fact lesbians. And of course that didn’t occur to me, nor did I actually catch the gay
overtones of On the Road. Kerouac’s writing was completely lost on me for some
reason. Did I answer your question?
TW: Oh, well I think so. My next question is, what role did the club play at the U of I?
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
7
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
VL: It played several roles for several different people. For the academics, for Archie it
was an academic steppingstone. It was a way for him to be able to acquire, he didn’t
actually teach as a formal class, but he acquired students, and I proudly number myself
among those. It was a way of bringing greater recognition, greater resources, hopefully
influencing the library for the academic side of things and bringing an academic librarian
and discographer’s view of traditional music. It was a way also, Archie has never made
any bones about, he taught us a great deal of morals, radical morals, unionist morals,
working man morals, but it was more than that. He really had some distinct ideas about
what was right and what was wrong, and civil disobedience and what was civil and what
was crime. He made it real clear to us what it meant by “This machine kills fascists” on
Woody Guthrie’s guitar. But that’s what I think Archie had in it, plus I think he’s a born
teacher, and genuinely loves to teach. If anybody will show the slightest bit of interest in
what he has to say, he will teach. I’m reminded of the quote from the student in Chaucer
that was written across our high school. Gladly would he learn and gladly would he
teach, or anyway, look up the quote. That is Archie, it also provided for some of the rest
of us a way of getting to see and mingle with and find and interact with the genuine folk.
I keep using the word folk, and I use it in several different senses. The American
traditional musicians, and Archie was of course most interested in labor and more
interested in hillbilly music was his particular specialty, and so without the Campus
Folksong Club we would not have been able to experience the Blue Sky Boys, we would
not have been able to experience Glenn Ohrlin the cowboy singer, we would not have
been able to bring Flatt and Skruggs to the campus, we would not have been able to bring
Ralph Stanley to the campus. Archie has a very long list of people in his article that he
mentions, frankly my memory, I have to look at his article to remember all of the people
that came, if you need a source. When I look at his list, I can think of a couple of other,
without his list I can’t even think of them. But he brought all of these people for the
outsiders this provided a form of legitimacy, we were able to have our performances at
the height of the club, we could have 500 or 600 people at our folk sings, hootenannies,
or open mic, however you want to call it, performances.
We were able to meet a whole bunch of other people among the student
population that perhaps weren’t outsiders exactly, but were interested. It provided a
focus of and a stage for us that wanted to perform. And once again those raging
hormones, it did provide a wider streams of ladies who might actually tolerate us. And if
it sounds like I’m hammering away at that, that was a major motivation, nobody talks
about it. But I’ve talked to other folklorists and other musicians, most of them will admit
that’s mostly how a whole lot of us got into it one way or another. Freud has a theory
that all artists are completely driven by sex drives, whether this is true or not, I couldn’t
say, but I certainly feel there is an element of truth to that. So there was the academic
side, there was the performance and bringing the people side, in other words these were
the public face, the ones that are usually talked about. Well I’ve constantly in this
conversation stressed the outsider-ness, well I also had a music house and this provided a
forum for us to meet people like Jack Elliott, Jim Queskin, more or less modern, at the
time, practitioners, Dave Van Ronk. I don’t think we had Dave Van Ronk there, but this
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
8
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
opened part of that society up to us, and I now get a little confused between what was
Campus Folksong Club official and what wasn’t, on that trip I mentioned before we
mentioned Archie and before it became official, I wound up going to the Village. There
weren’t that many of us that were interested in traditional music in that way. So I wound
up, I could expect that if I went to see Dave Van Roth and he would put me up for a night
get me a couple of gigs, which he did, opening for him at the “Café Wha?”, and that’s not
as grand as it sounds, since my function was to get rid of people to turn over the crowd,
which I did very effectively. None the less, went out to the Ash Grove in Los Angeles
and spent a week at Theodore Bikel’s house, where he was also, he was gone, he was in
a movie some place, but Jack Elliott was on the bill and he had the keys to the house, so
he put up me and the other artists from the Ash Grove that particular week were
Lightning Hopkins and Hugh Romney, who’s better known now as Wavy Gravy; Ken
Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fame, but he was just doing stand up comedy under the
name of Hugh Romney at the time, Acid had not yet reared its seductive head. So partly
it made contact, and then there was my music house. And there was a constant stream of
musicians coming in and out, and we had a scene. The scene attracted more musicians, so
that meant that people like Mike Melford who is still a lawyer in that field, but was a
mandolin player, excellent mandolin player who produced a whole bunch of records for
Flying Fish with Nashville session men, giving them basically solo albums with their
choice of Nashville session men. Bluegrass albums, he produced a whole string of
albums for John Hartford. Once we had a scene like that, musicians who were there all
along came out of the woodwork.
I refer again to John Hartford, and the Bray Brothers, who were a bluegrass band,
there were local boys, but we had no way of finding them, but once the Campus
Folksong Club came into being they heard about us, one way or another we were able to
make contact. We had a platform also to be able to offer gigs to people, this in turn made
them receptive to research, receptive to visits, so I guess I could sum it up, we made
contacts, is the short version of that. But then there was still the general campus
shenanigans, which was again, my house was a music house, but it was also quite the
zoo. And Fritz would, I can remember scenes like Fritz sitting in his room, which also
doubled as a dining room and his bedroom, typing Russian translations about some kind
of roundworm for a Russian professor, he was translating, either an English book into
Russian or a Russian, I think it was a Russian book into English on worms.
TW: Fritz knows Russian?
VL: Yeah, oh yeah, he knows Russian. He was also a fireman on the Illinois Central
Railroad, so when he wasn’t typing, he was doing that. And the other times he was
editing the Autoharp. Which was our mimeographed, or as Archie called it,
‘hectographed’ publication. There were sort of perpetual jam sessions, perpetual music
party, perpetual stream of musicians flowing though my house. The reason I say my
house it was in my name, I paid the rent, and I had a lot of roommates. But basically I
had to be responsible.
Victor Lukas
His home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
18 June, 2007 Interview
9
Vic Lukas: VL
Tracie Wilson: TW
The Campus Folksong Club also provided for the audiences in general, hey cheap
entertainment, for whatever reason our concerts attracted a whole lot of people, and as the
club moved forward we were able to have bigger and better concerts, and the students
whether they were actually interested, by this time folk was very fashionable. Many of
them were interested in going beyond Dylan, the Kingston Trio, the commercial things.
There was a large number of student musicians of various sorts, well now they all have
rocks, you know rock bands, here in town there’s five or six student bluegrass bands, at
least a half dozen old time bands, and I can think of some that aren’t students. We have
three or four active jam sessions sort of on a once a month basis, different places, we
camped together at music festivals, none of this was in existence. And so for the student
musicians, we were really the only easily accessible stage. Some of them sang practically
opera; I didn’t like that much, many of them went in for what I call the folk strum. Think
of Dylan’s guitar style, which does not involve mostly individual strings, I’m talking
about early Dylan. There were many people who were taking all of their stylings and
everything from the more commercial things, which of course with no one but a student
zealot, you know, could dislike that, but we disliked it majorly. We also were able to,
with the Campus Folksong Club, we were able to increase the availability of records. We
viewed, toward the later years, we viewed, I viewed, personally viewed Dylan, I still do,
as the anti-Christ for taking perfectly good traditional songs, putting his paltry words to
them, performing them in the most extricable possible way with his ghastly voice
untraditional method of playing. And besides which, when he first came out I drove all
the way to the University of Indiana to see him perform because I had heard this was the
greatest folk thing, he came out sang two songs badly, barfed, and left the stage and that
was the end of that. You know, I’ve never forgiven him for that. He’s employed friends,
and you know he’d done a lot since, I recognize that much of his song writing is great.
But part of it was, if that’s what people think are folk, they’re not going to be buying the
Folkways Records, they’re not going to be the few traditional reissues that were
beginning to come out. Archie made a deal with a guy named Kokoefer, who had a little
record store, but we would up, I believe, having to guarantee that if he got in things from
Folk Legacy or from Arhoolie or from Folkways that we would basically if they didn’t
see, we’d buy them. So he didn’t want to take a risk on them. Well this is what it took.
And I, personally, feel that if it hadn’t been for Dylan, the commercial things, there
wouldn’t have been anywhere near the difficulty that we had. But this was another
function that the folksong club performed. And then it just provided a social center for
the zoo side of things, a sort of a musical animal house. And I guess that’s it for functions
of the folksong club.
TW: Okay, did the political climate of the 1960s have an impact on the club and how its
members perceived themselves?
VL: Yes, indeed. I think we’ve already touched on Archie Green, and his liberal politics
and his activism as a unionist and interest in labor. We, by virtue again of having been
started out with this group of outsiders, and with Woody Guthrie for many of us, perhaps
not so much Archie, but for many of us Woody Guthrie was, as opposed to Dylan,
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Woody Guthrie was the similar one that was real and that one that we should be listening
to. And of course there’s some radical politics there. Pete Seeger was one of the first folk
singers I’d heard and once again he and the Weavers, and I looked into it a bit, and the
Almanac Singers before him with, again you know, majorly liberal politics. I’ve talked a
little bit about wanting to reach a, I really believe that the teenage rebellion of the fifties
was not a teenage rebellion, if anything it was a teenage revolution. Rebellion is an
exploitative term that is used by winners against the losers, we didn’t have the American
rebellion. You have the Nat Turner rebellion, can you think of any rebellion that’s been
successful that is called a rebellion? It’s called revolutionary. ‘I have a new idea, a new
product, what a rebellious idea!” Uh uh, this is revolutionary, that’s the sales term. I
think we were the proto-civil rights movement. Because the same people wound up, not
only did we reach across to look into Black music but these are the same people and the
same singers that rode the freedom buses, theses are the same people that were at the
Chicago police riot in 1968, democratic convention in Chicago, these are the people who
went, I mean not necessarily each of the names I’ve mentioned but overall, the people
that were singing the folk songs, singing the people’s music, were the people who were
working for social change. These are the same people that Nixon had the FBI looking
into. These are the people who, and I quote, I just saw a documentary on the hippies, they
had a quote about the FBI project to discredit the civil rights movement. People who
espoused brotherly love, people who espoused equality of the races, and people who are
anti-war. These were enemies of America, that’s parts of the charter for this project.
Brotherly love, this is anti-American, this is un-America. But there was a whole lot, some
of it was just plain students wanna be students and wanna piss off their elders, students
wanna have fun and wanna play drinking games and sex games and whatever games they
are, there’s a certain amount of that, that you know is the baseline, but above and beyond
the baseline, we genuinely cared, and we cared a whole lot. And people since have
remained politically active, some people from the Campus Folksong Club, not
necessarily my closest friends were not so much political, we were musicians, and that’s
particularly what our bag was, not that we didn’t do the other things. But I truly believed
then, and I truly believe now that the best political activism I can do is to sing songs and
make people aware of what I consider to be a real tradition, and to try to make the values
that are promoted at the surface of folk music actually coming to being.
As far as the rest of the politics, there was university politics. It basically took a
revolution and took a, at that time fire brand like Archie who had some vestige of
academic respectability, at least more than any of the rest of us did, to be able to make it
happen, and to be able to bludgeon the University into allowing us to have gathering
space, allowing us to be on campus, allowing us to even have something called a
folksong club, and there were various incidents. But the Campus Folksong Club, while
they may look back with pride, just like you know everybody loves Martin Luther King,
a whole lot of folks claim to like Martin Luther King. And speaking of that rebellion
business, you know the word rebellion, really pisses me off, teenage rebellion, we don’t
talk about Martin Luther King’s Negro rebellion do we? Sometimes he’s referred to as a
revolutionary, but we all respect his work, and it’s certainly not a rebellion. So why not
those of us who musically went ahead and prepared, why not call Pete Seeger, who
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popularized, he’s ever credited with writing but he didn’t, he makes no claim to it, “We
Shall Overcome”? He’s the one who brought it up to the front, sometimes Guy Carawan
is credited with that, but between the pair of them it was one or the other. Which is now
an anthem, close to a national anthem. And yeah, we sang, “We Shall Overcome”, and
we did this before it became so heavily associated with Martin Luther King and his
movement. We were having black people on our stage when Martin Luther King was in
jail writing his letters from Birmingham. And, trust me, that was a big political act. We
were the only, I think I mentioned this, the only campus group that had to have armed,
hire off duty armed guards from the police department to be, to look at our events,
whether they were large or small. And I can’t imagine why that is, but I think that our
politics were a bit unpopular.
TW: How would you describe the impact that your involvement in the club had on you
then and later in life?
VL: Well the later in life is easy; I have stayed with music ever since, I continue not
quite the same zoo, but my life is a daily whirl of interest in traditional and actually other,
I’m interested now in early music, I like vaudeville, I’m interested in early swing, I am
interested in minstrel music and the history of minstrel shows, I’m interested in black and
white string bands, I am interested in vintage country music, think Hank Williams, Lefty
Frizzell, vintage things as well as the older string band. And my life is completely
devoted to listening and understanding music. I play but I have never been gifted with
really being a brilliant musician, I work, I am passionate, and I work very very hard at it,
but I am not a great musician. But I have been privileged throughout, from the Campus
Folksong Club, I have been privileged throughout to have had doors open for me to meet
truly great artists, to meet people whose lives are an inspiration, and to be able to reach in
and experience a little bit of that American that I longed for so much. And I now realize it
comes in slightly different forms, and some of that liberal America and some of those
blues notes come from the most died in the wall conservative religious bigots that you
could imagine, I mention no names. But you know underneath all that there’s a great deal
of the real and vibrant America and I have now learned to look across that a little bit.
As far as how it affected my life then, well, I wound up my whole social life
partly as an outsider but I found a focus and a place to be, a way of being an outsider
insider with this. I made lifelong friendships, many of the people that you’ve
interviewed, in fact all of the people that you’ve interviewed so far. I’d lost track of
Jarvis, but I am still in touch with these people, these are my frat buddies, if you will. I
don’t remember the names of anybody from the Greek Letter organization I used to
belong to, but I remember these people. We correspond by e-mail, we exchange jokes.
When I have come here I see people, I just took a friend, Rich Olsen, who was part of our
group of people, he was a harmonica player for, who played in the Vic Lukas Blues
Band, and later in the, let’s see, what’d we call it, the Third Barner Church of the
Unfulfilled, a blues band. I’ve stayed in touch with Mike Melford, mandolin player par
excellence, I did documentary photography. I had the great privilege of meeting and
filming Dink Roberts, one of the very last of the black banjo players, you know left from
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the previous tradition. I’m just trying to differentiate, there’s now a new black banjo
movement, the Chocolate Drops, and other people are picking up on it. Just by way of a
distinction. I have through that also made a number of contacts and good friends among
folklorists and similar people, particularly in this community where there seem to be a
whole lot of us. And I feel that my life has been affected for the better, and I am grateful
to each of my musical friends who has helped, I am grateful to the people who were nice
to a passionate young kind who didn’t know anything, I am grateful to Archie for being
willing to put up with, well basically a bunch of carousing outsiders, students who no
doubt were in some ways an embarrassment to him. I feel that the Campus Folksong
Club is the best thing that happened in my life at the time, well, there were girls, there
was a social scene, there was a place to be, there was ways of feeling proud, there was a
performance venue, there were contacts outside, and I cannot imagine what I would be or
who I would be without those things, and its just never stopped.
TW: So my last question is, what else should we cover, from your perspective? What
other things did we not touch on?
VL: Well, I think that it’s important to touch on, there was a divide, some of which was
spoken some of which was not, between the academic people and the musically oriented
people. By academic, Archie was not a player I don’t believe, Judy McCulloh plays,
Doyle was a faculty and played autoharp, and the students that got recorded were the
PG&MS, Philo Glee and Mandolin Society, I’m sure you talked to Doyle and have heard
about that. And then there was the Green Fields of Illinois recording, which was a field
recording, and thereby, this was the matter of digging up a bunch of field people, well
folk as I use it, and putting out some recordings of them. But this perhaps exemplifies at
the same time, the people that we had to overlook for that recording, the Bray Brothers
who were a magnificent and legendary bluegrass band, and John Hartford, who later took
up a career, but was a part of those, and certainly these folks had just as much claim to
tradition, as much claim to musical skills, but they weren’t of quite such academic
interest. And we would up with many of our, there were artists that we did not record
who were great musicians and had an equally valid claim, but they didn’t smell quite as
good from the academic point of view. We didn’t have many electric artists, I believe we
had Muddy Waters, but we didn’t have anybody else electric. We did not have other
contemporary blues bands, we certainly didn’t have the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, it
was partly a matter of the things that we didn’t do. I can understand, in view of the
University’s looking down on the whole folk music thing, and being pretty doubtful
about the outsiders and the communists and all the rest of it, perhaps contemporary, or
close to contemporary things might not have gone over that well. We did actually have
the Bray Brothers for a concert.
But I always felt there was both a social and a musical divide between the
academics who didn’t play on one hand and the musicians on the other, who I felt had a
wider view. And I still hold that view to some extent. Although now, there are far more
academics who are also musicians, we see them with the earlier versions of that were
Mike Seeger, although academic, hmm, no Ph.D. Mike Seeger is a consummate
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musician, and Tracy Schwarz in the second incarnation, is a great folklorist, married to
Ginny Hawker, lovely lady. They lived on the bus with the Stanley’s, traveled with
Maybelle Carter, but they don’t have a Ph.D. So they’re, not as valuable. And letting
them actually write something, they have to write in the Old Time Herald but they don’t
write in academic journals, peer reviewed, they don’t have a union card, I feel strongly
about this. I think that there’s a big divide between academe and I believe that it has, to
some extent vanished but I believe it’s still there, and think we kind of come back to
those who can do, and those who can’t teach or write about it. My dad was an oriental art
collector, he knew a great deal about art, he was also a rug collector, he became an expert
in that, because an appraiser, and he was actually a pretty renown expert and collector in
that stuff. I was always told that I should not take any music classes because there wasn’t
any money in it. I was not allowed to take an art class when I was in high school or in
college, I was not allowed to take a music class, same thing. When Rowan, my daughter,
announced that she wanted to study art in college, his answer to that was ‘What we’ll
have to nip that in the bud won’t we?’ Perhaps by telling you that, maybe you’re seeing a
little bit, that maybe playing into the rest of the academic verses the artist and I know that
that’s a tension which has gone on forever. And actually art, the real truth is it’s a
symbiotic relationship, art can’t get anywhere without somebody to comment on it and
say it’s okay. You remember the Wizard of Oz? You remember when Dorothy and the
Tin Man and all those go to the wizard, and he says I want a heart, and he says you don’t
really need a heart, you need something that goes tick tock, and gives him a clock. And
then to the Cowardly Lion he says you don’t need courage, what you need is a medal.
And the Scarecrow wants a brain, he says you don’t want a brain, you want a diploma,
and gives him a diploma. I had a dream about that, that I was also among those, and I
said to the wizard I want to be an artist, and the wizard said to me no, I wanted the talent
to be an artist, he says no you don’t need talent, what you need is a manifesto. And that’s
the academic side.
Well another thing, I won’t go into any detail about it here, but suffice it to say
that among the musicians, the drug revolution that came to being was also definitely a
part of the non-academic folksong club, I don’t think Archie was even aware of it. But
let me put it this way, the people in the Campus Folksong Club were among the first to
become interested in LSD. We were among the first to exhibit any noticeable student
interest in marijuana. All of which was partly, you know the student culture was moving
that way, it’s not a matter of we invented it or any different, but at various parts the
student or musician element of that was at the vanguard for the University, and I think
that this has persisted, in some ways, a great deal. I think that one of the unspoken things
that only can be talked about after a lot of people are dead or until the climate changes,
but while it’s commonplace to talk about the role of drugs in jazz. It is not common to
talk about the role of drugs in folk music, but they’re there just as much as they were. In
fact the same folk, marijuana prohibition was invented for two reasons, look into the
history of it. But the short version is, to prevent the danger of, there’s a quote that I can’t
quite remember, but this is close, this is not actually it: “To stop rampaging Negroes out
after our women,” and the quote is very close. Another one had to do with the Mexicans
and the immigration issue, and if you look into the actual history, you will discover that it
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had very little to do with health and a great deal to do with providing employment for
Harry Ansliger’s treasury agents when prohibition went away, they had 2,000
T[Treasury]-men that had to be kept busy doing something. And basically it had to do
with anti-civil rights and anti-immigration sentiment; it’s still there.
Of course as radicals you can imagine associations with beatnik, San Francisco,
centers like Chicago, blues clubs, clearly these were a part of the landscape, and nobody
ever talks about it, the academics didn’t, we didn’t talk to the academics about it, didn’t
want to embarrass them, they probably didn’t do that. To this day I have no idea whether
Archie surmised, I can tell you that he certainly has plausible deniability, nothing was
ever said that I know of, nor was there any misbehavior or anything in public that could
discredit either Archie or the folksong club. A lot of things were perhaps attributed to
drink that perhaps might have been attributed to other things, but drinking was
respectable and legal, well sorta legal. So that’s just something for future people to think
about. So I guess that’s it. So now turn it off and I’ll tell you some other things.